Reacting to news of Israel expanding control over the West Bank, leader of the Parliamentary Green Party, Dr Ellie Chowns MP, said:
“The reported decisions by Israel’s security cabinet to make it easier for settlers to buy land in the West Bank and to expand enforcement powers over Palestinians are a profound assault on Palestinian rights, further entrenching occupation and legitimising illegal settlement expansion.
“These measures are built on the foundation of decades of dispossession, subjugation, and military control of Palestinians, and stand against the stark backdrop of the catastrophic genocide committed in Gaza, where swathes of the population remain deprived of vital aid, medical care, and adequate nutrition, and Palestinians in Gaza continue to be killed by Israeli forces despite a ceasefire being in place. These are not the actions of a state seeking peace; they are the latest extension of a long-upheld system that denies Palestinians the right to determine their own future.
“When the Green Party welcomed the UK’s recognition of the state of Palestine last year as a necessary and long-overdue step, we also warned that recognition alone was not enough – it must be accompanied by meaningful action to uphold Palestinian rights. The UK must take those actions now – ban imports from illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine, halt all arms sales to and military cooperation with the Israeli Government, drive independent investigations into war crimes and support justice mechanisms for victims, and impose sanctions on those Israeli Government officials who are responsible, including Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior figures, given the flagrant disregard for international law displayed through the expansion of illegal settlements.”
Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
As the Cuban government announced Monday that the Trump administration’s oil blockade on the country would soon leave airlines without jet fuel, US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that the international community has become far too accepting of acts of economic warfare that collectively punish an entire population, not just government officials.
Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told Drop Site News reporter Julian Andreone that the stage for the worsened suffering of Cuban people was set in Gaza, where both Republican and Democratic US officials have backed Israel’s starvation policy and military assault since October 2023.
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“This is what we’ve seen with Gaza, right, this is a new kind of era of depravity opened up, where there used to be—or there was this stated commitment on human rights—that innocent civilians were almost exempt from the rules of war, from blockades,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Cuban people have long been victimized by the US government’s decadeslong, illegal trade embargo. But Trump’s decision to cut off Cuba’s oil supply from Venezuela, which was its largest energy supplier, and threaten to slap tariffs on any country that provides oil to the island nation, has left families facing lengthy blackouts and the threat that Cuba’s healthcare system could soon grind to a halt without fuel to keep hospitals running.
Trump has claimed he aims to punish the Cuban government, which he said last month constitutes “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the US. He accused the country, without evidence, of harboring terrorists. Cuban officials have vehemently condemned the accusations.
Ocasio-Cortez compared Trump’s economic attack on Cuba to the catastrophe the US-backed Israeli military has imposed on Gaza since 2023, when it began its assault and humanitarian aid blockade in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. A “ceasefire” deal was reached in October, but hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by the Israel Defense Forces since then and Israel has continued to block aid.
While persistently claiming Hamas is the target of the assault—which international experts and human rights groups have called a genocide—the Israeli military, with US support, has killed more than 71,000 Palestinians and has bombed homes, schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure.
“What has transpired is that now it’s kind of become acceptable that the entire Western world will look the other way as they starve and deprive a people because they find political actors or political regimes in that country to be objectionable,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “What we are seeing here is the possible precipice of hospitals running out of fuel… We’re talking about innocent children, women that could be put in harm’s way.”
“It’s incumbent upon all of us to defend human rights no matter where they are,” she added.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, agreed with the congresswoman’s analysis.
“Gaza was not just a genocide,” he said, but was meant to further Israel’s goal “to destroy much of international law and the norms around the use of force in order to make increasingly inhumane use of violence and coercion against CIVILIANS permissible.”
Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, added that Ocasio-Cortez was “rightly picking up the banner of a rules-based international consensus” on human rights, which was abandoned by the Biden administration when it gave financial and political support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Ocasio-Cortez echoed the concerns voiced earlier this week by Pierre-Emmanuel Dupont, an international expert on sanctions law, who told the Cuban storytelling outlet Belly of the Beastthat the Trump administration was “posing the risk of imminent humanitarian collapse in relation to the lack of fuel, which may gravely affect basically all human rights of the civilian population there.”
“Sanctions should be expected to be limited to officials,” said Dupont. “They are not supposed to apply bluntly to the whole population—which they do. They constitute collective punishment to the extent that they hit each and every Cuban citizen irrespective of their relationship with the government or regime.”
Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Starmer ‘on borrowed time’ after losing Mandelson and McSweeney
Keir Starmer’s reputation will “forever…be associated with the decision to appoint the best friend of the world’s most notorious paedophile” as British ambassador to Washington, the author of a book on the prime minister has said.
Investigative journalist Paul Holden told Declassified that after the resignation of the prime minister’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney: “Keir Starmer is on borrowed time. He’s done. There’s no coming back from this.
“I mean he was pretty much toast before this because he was so deeply unpopular and there were already moves to remove him.
“The problem is we now have this political vacuum because the success of the McSweeney-Mandelson-Starmer political project has been to totally take utter control of the commanding heights of the Labour party. It’s bureaucracy but also the cabinet.”
Holden, who wrote a book about Starmer’s top aide called The Fraud, said “The eight most senior people in cabinet all have links to McSweeney going back years and decades. This entire political project is implicated and tainted by this scandal.
…
Original article by Simon Lock republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Peter Mandelson emailed Jeffrey Epstein after his release from house arrest to recommend a holiday home where the financier could host his “guests”.
Mandelson said he had found a villa in Italy that Epstein could use, offering “privacy with accompanying rooms for your ‘guests’” – with quote marks around the word guests.
It is not clear who this was in reference to. Epstein’s connections among the global elite included bankers, royals and Middle Eastern sheikhs.
The email was published this week by the US government as part of the Epstein Files cache. Its sender has been redacted but we were able to identify it as coming from Mandelson.
A spokesperson for Mandelson said: “Lord Mandelson regrets, and will regret until to his dying day, that he believed Epstein’s lies about his criminality. Lord Mandelson did not discover the truth about Epstein until after his death in 2019. He is profoundly sorry that powerless and vulnerable women and girls were not given the protection they deserved.”
The email chain is from August 2010, a month after Epstein had been released from house arrest following his conviction for child sex offences.
In the message in question, Mandelson tells Epstein that he is due to arrive back in London from “Myk”, shorthand for the Greek island of Mykonos, at the end of August. He goes on to say: “Found you a great place to stay on the Amalfi coast near to Positano. Zeferelli home converted into beautiful suites and privacy with accompanying rooms for your ‘guests’.”
While the identity of the sender is blacked out in the published file, other emails from the same period confirm that Mandelson travelled at that time to Mykonos, which he also referred to as “Myk” in separate emails. The email in question was sent from a Blackberry, Mandelson’s favoured method of communication at the time.
The redaction in the files leaves some parts of the email address visible, and we were able to match it with an address used by Mandelson (see video below).
The conversation with Epstein took place during a period of frequent contact between the pair following Mandelson’s exit from frontline politics after Labour’s election defeat.
The men discussed job opportunities for Mandelson, including with mining giant Glencore, investment banks Lazard and Deutsche Bank, and his own advisory firm, Global Counsel.
The house Mandelson refers to in the email appears to be Villa Treville, an exclusive 16-suite luxury hotel located on a clifftop overlooking the Gulf of Salerno.
There is no evidence that Epstein ever visited the villa.
Villa Treville as it appears today
Lead image: Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein pictured together. Credit: Department of Justice / ZUMA Press Wire / Shutterstock
Reporter: Simon Lock
Enablers editor: Eleanor Rose
Deputy editor: Katie Mark
Editor: Franz Wild
Production editor: Alex Hess
TBIJ has a number of funders, a full list of which can be found here. None of our funders have any influence over editorial decisions or output.
Original article by Simon Lock republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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